David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes. Young politicians like me are like everyone else in the Public Service. What we accumulate from our superannuation payments is our pension scheme.

Getting back to the legislation in hand, we are changing the amount that is assessed. Some people were assessing it up to 50 per cent of the value, which allowed quite a generous income stream from the government as well as the pension that you were receiving from the state governments. I admit that it will change your situation, but these schemes were very generous and when you look at it in the cold hard light of day the changes are reasonable and, unfortunately, necessary because when we have twice as many people in the coming years relying on a government pension for their sole source of income there will not be enough to go around. Superannuants who are paying for their own superannuation from money that they have saved are saving the government money because they have put aside for their own retirement.

Concession cards will continue but the energy supplement will replace the seniors supplement. That is a significant change, but no-one will lose their veterans' affairs gold card. The seniors supplement is going to change. It could not be sustained. Another difficult decision has had to be made in relation to the pension education supplement. That is quite relevant in the Lyne electorate because we have a lot of seniors studying at the University of the Third Age and other universities. When we have students requiring support at the start of their life, that is a luxury we cannot afford any more when we have such a bad set of finances. We have to make these difficult decisions. Not that education in the golden years of your life is a bad thing—it is an excellent thing, and I recommend it continue.

I have a few other comments I would like to make. Pensioners who do have a change and lose some of their pension entitlement will automatically be issued with a Commonwealth seniors health card indefinitely. A lot of people I have spoken to who were concerned about these proposed changes thought they were going to lose that. I can reassure them that they are not.

The other thing to remember is what members on the other side have proposed. They are going to include the home. A man's home is his castle. They are planning to put the value of your house into the calculations to see whether you have too many assets to qualify for the pension. They like to stand in this chamber and criticise us for really hard decisions. I freely admit that they are not popular with those people who are affected, but overall we will have a much more sustainable system.

Let us look at what members of the Labor Party are proposing. They are proposing that if your house is worth more than $1.5 million it be assessed as an asset. In the whole Lyne electorate I think there would be 10 houses in that price bracket, but most of the people in Sydney or Melbourne who bought their house 20 or 30 years ago would be swept up by this. I am absolutely shocked that the Labor Party could be thinking of including the family home. The asset level they were going to set was $500,000. If you think ours are bitter pills to swallow, watch out for what the Labor Party has in store for you.

See this speech in context